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The original Raspberry Pi went on sale four years ago, and more than 8,000,000 units have shipped since then. Raspberry Pi computers are used in schools and universities, in factories and other industrial applications, in home automation and hobby projects, and much more.

Today the Raspberry Pi 3 was announced, featuring a 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, making it roughly 10x the speed of the original Pi 1. Many people will be pleased to hear that the Raspberry Pi 3 also features on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, greatly improving the device's connectivity. The new device goes on sale today at the usual price of US $35.

What's new?

The Raspberry Pi 3 comes with 802.11n wireless LAN, so connecting to your home network to get your Pi online is easy. The Raspberry Pi 3 also has Bluetooth 4.1 and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), so you can connect a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, or any other Bluetooth-enabled device. The addition of these wireless technologies means you don't need to buy extra USB dongles and use up any of the USB ports and avoid using a hub.

The Pi 3 boots in a matter of seconds, an improvement even on the Pi 2, which was much faster than Pi 1. Once you're at the desktop, the Pi 3 is noticeably slicker and applications like the web browser respond more like you'd expect from a modern PC than ever before.

A small but handy change is the microSD card slot, which was previously a push-push mechanism, is now push-pull (like on the Pi Zero). This means you can't accidentally pop it out while adjusting your cables.

Get started

You can buy the new Pi right now from distributors around the world. You'll need a recent Raspbian or NOOBS image on a microSD card, which you can download from the Raspberry Pi website. Alternatively, there are a whole host of Linux distributions, and specific images for various applications—from media centres to retro gaming platforms.

What's next?

There's room in the family of Raspberry Pi boards for a Pi 3 Model A, and a new compute module with the Pi 3 chip. These products are expected later in the year. The Pi 3 Model A will take the form factor of the existing Model A+ from 2014, which is available now for US$ 20. Because the Pi's camera module accessory's sensor has reached EOL, an upgraded camera board will be released. There's no firm date, but that's also expected in 2016.

The Pi Zero shocked the world when it landed in November—a tiny $5 computer, but its production run has been limited (in no small part due to the introduction of Pi 3). But Pi Zero manufacturing will be continued and more stock will make its way to distributors in due course. However, the flagship device has always been the current Model B of the time, as it includes the most connectivity and stands up best as a general purpose PC.

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About the author

Ben Nuttall - Ben Nuttall is the Raspberry Pi Community Manager. In addition to his work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, he's into free software, maths, kayaking, GitHub, Adventure Time, and Futurama. Follow Ben on Twitter @ben_nuttall.

Our distributors are billion dollar companies who have the capital to order Raspberry Pi in huge numbers. We are a small charity who do not have lots of cashflow available. We've just ordered 150,000 units of Zero and they'll be distributed to suppliers shortly.

My Pi 3 + Power supply arrived first thing Friday in Sydney from RS (free shipping). We were about to set off for Canberra to attend a wedding, so I only got around to getting my hands on it today. Loaded latest Raspbian, plugged HDMI, power, and keyboard/mouse dongle, and applied power. Boots in no time. Minimal config required to get up and running including wi-fi.
This is a much more polished system than the Pi 2 B.

abc is too negative about the Pi nano. The fact that the cables cost much more than the nano makes it all the more remarkable.

AS Explained by the Foundation. The Pi Zero has no margin so they pay for them out of their pockets and produce them. And they are exceptionally stingy sending PO's for what they know they can sell. It is not RS or MCM that make them. So they drop a PO on Sony very slowly leading to what one can say is profit taking by distributors since they cannot make money on the $5.

Eventually everyone will learn that one should prototype on a A+ and go to production with the $5 Zero. I will not buy more than one unless I can figure out what to do with it to make money. Best uses so far I have seen is the compute modules made using the USB OTG port. The best cable I saw so far is the IO Gear OTG hub with sd card from IOGEAR for Android / Samsung phones works perfectly! ($12) Think of the Zero as a $5 cell phone compute replacement.

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